Ever got involved in folk dancing? Ever tried to plan a public performance picking dancers from a mix-ability side?
Assume you have a repertory from which you select the dances for the event and sort them in sessions. Since -as I presume- you have the dancers x dances matrix, it can be used for a variety of other purposes:
1. Grading of competence from 0 (none) to 4 (expert), for self-marking and foremen's marking. We could even introduce an anonymised group-wide measure Sum(i,j) to track aggregate learning progress and get the aggregate published monthly.
2. Marking of preference from 0 (hate). 1 (will do under duress), 2 (can do any time), 3 (like), 4 (favourite).
3. Given #1 and #2, calculate Aspiration gap; i.e. difference between preference level and competence level. E.g. in my case: Banks of the Dee Preference 4 but competence 3, a gap of 1; Vandals, Preference 2 but competence 4, a gap of -2. This will guide dancers into what to concentrate and foremen on how to plan events coverage in a way that keeps dancers happy but also raise the aggregate experience.
4. WAIT! It gets WORSE... To do 1,2 and 3, 'all' you need is a number of Excel licenses for all dancers and a short 3-day course in basic maths, after which 'everybody' will love to do nothing but calculate the odds just before every dance, in order to decide the impact of the particular instance on their projected aspiration gap.
5. Aspiration gap projection is less trivial than the above: One could introduce a feedback agility policy, from 0 (no feedback), 1 (feedback yearly), 2 (feedback per event ~ 'huddle'), 3 (after every dance ~ 'didn't you do well!'), 4 (...DURING the dance ~ "Oi!!"). The perceived aspiration gap at any time provides feedback into the next performance; i.e. how one performs is influenced by what she thinks she could achieve by putting a lot or little effort.
6. Now it gets a bit trickier but it is quite rewarding: If you get the feedback policy wrong, you might end up destabilising one's progress. So, the use of stability theory to ascertain stability of each dancer is essential. You might need some more licenses for a control system design tool - Excel won't do that on its own.
7. And now the ICING ON THE CAKE: Having got everybody familiar and confident in the selection of competence, preference, aspiration gap, feedback policy, etc. we could attempt to orchestrate the process across all dancers simultaneously. This is now a Dynamical System, for which you can seek mathematical treatment by Profs George MacFarlane who once taught me this stuff quite some time ago. That was not for designing dancing 'grids' but things like electrical power grids, oil pipelines and chemical plants.
8. Alternatively, you could burn this blog post, phone the nearest Mental Health institution to send two men in white coats for me and ...
pick dances and dancers out of a flowery straw hat as Morris people have been doing for centuries.
